Guilty Crown is a 22 episode anime set in the near future. The anime doesn’t do a great job at explaining the premise in the first few episodes since you’re left with a messy pile of concepts mashed together. The protagonist is Ouma Shu, who is a normal Japanese high schooler with an issue in truly befriending others. There was something called the Apocalypse Virus years ago and this led to the government organisation GHQ eventually gaining power. The virus is still circulating, striking fear in residents as it causes the body to crystallize and the person to eventually die.
Shu quickly meets Inori, who was hurt and hiding inside an abandoned building that Shu regularly visits as he uses the computer there to create videos. This is where he gets caught up with a vial containing the Void Genome. Naturally, through events somewhat outside of Shu’s control, he gains this power and is able to pull the “void” out of people. By pulling the void out, it materializes it into something that reflects that person. In order to get out of a jam, Shu pulls the void out of Inori, which is in the form of a long blade.
We quickly learn that Inori is part of an organisation that are branded terrorists as they oppose GHQ. Gai, as the head of this so called terrorist organisation, is well liked by its members, who all look up to him even though Shu doesn’t understand why. He has quite the hate for Gai at first, which can feel completely irrational. Gai on the other hand is portrayed at perfect (or near perfect) in a lot of ways, which can be annoying as well.
Shu unfortunately falls into the class of anime protagonists who has multiple female characters straight up falling for him. Some will fight for his attention, while others only discover it when they become jealous. The bad news is that this aspect can take a bit of the focus at times, which does not add much to the story. His character development gets worse when it goes through a generic phase of not fully believing in the cause. The lack of conviction and direction from Shu is frustrating. When Shu gets to a stage of being horrified at what he’s done and can’t go on, you can’t help but feel that there’s little going for him.
The anime combines a lot of popular elements such as the protagonist being a normal person that gains a special ability, giant mecha being involved in a lot of the fights, a futuristic sci-fi setting and of course, the ease at which Shu finds himself with the opposite sex. However, having them all together doesn’t automatically make it a success and the flaw that Guilty Crown has is that it struggles to make all the elements coherent.
There is a mix of slice-of-life in among all the other crazy stuff to the point that it feels kind of at odds. You’ll have Shu being arrested and then breaking out of GHQ before returning to school the day after. It doesn’t fit with common sense even if the anime tries to explain why this was possible. There are contrived scenarios where a person with a void that has the perfect ability needed for the situation is conveniently just found or identified moments before it is required. There are too many instances of the story leaning on these contrived conveniences.
The middle of the season if where the plot goes off the rails with some weird and unexpected developments. While the first half wasn’t great, it was okay, the second half gets worse with every episode. It feels as if the writers gave up and just made stuff up as it went along. Contradictions start to appear, characters become unlikable and the plot developments are eyeball-rolling cringeworthiness in every episode. It is hard to stomach in many points. The ending is jumbled and the anime felt like it wanted to move away from all the cliches of the genre but ended up embracing a lot of it anyway. Tropes are not bad but when the anime does it in such a forced awkward way, it’s terrible.
The second half of the season tries for some highly impactful character development of Shu. This only serves to highlight the same flaws of the character again and again. Shu flip-flops lacking conviction and is too easily influenced. It feels like a switch is being flipped on and off, he goes from one extreme to the other making the whole process weak and hard to expect. This is on the same level as amateur writing trying to be edgy and dark. To make matters worse, this happens with all the other secondary characters such that no one in the whole anime is compelling or likable. Their change in personalities and their actions just completely contradicts how they were portrayed before or were irrational. Yes, there are extraneous circumstances but it just too out of character for a lot of them.
Overall, Guilty Crown had potential but it effectively squanders it right away. None of the characters are truly likable and all of them became terrible characters in the second half. This means that there is no one left that you feel like that you can support for. The story continually gets worse as the season goes by pulling stuff out of a hat again and again, going in a direction that you don’t expect, but not in a good way.
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